A History of the World From the 20th to the 21st Century

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Stalin never trusted the West, though he did not anticipate any immediate Western aggression. The orthodoxy still persisted in h ...

would not share their nuclear secrets with the Russians except on terms that were totally unac- ceptable, and they maintained a ...

revolution and the Soviet state. With the war over, how could the harshness of communist rule from above continue to be justifie ...

mixed feelings about his possible successor and appeared to leave an unfillable vacuum, but the leadership was nevertheless repl ...

the remoter regions of the Soviet Union not pre- viously cultivated because they were subject to droughts or other unfavourable ...

than Malenkov and Molotov in improving rela- tions with the West, with China and with Yugoslavia. Malenkov also proved himself i ...

and was kept under rigid control. Zionism was treated as ideologically hostile to the state – mere Jewish descent officially was ...

intended, rather, to create opportunities for the expansion of Soviet power and influence without risking war. Khrushchev was ri ...

Stalin’s Russia was determined to turn Poland into an obedient Soviet-controlled state; all vestiges of democratic influence wer ...

All these repressive measures failed to break the religious feelings of the majority of Poles. Farmers clung to their soil and w ...

own position in Moscow. From a Soviet point of view the danger Gomulka presented lay in his Polish nationalism – another Tito co ...

of 24 October two important emissaries arrived from Moscow, Mikhail Suslov, the party ideolo- gist, and Anastas Mikoyan, the old ...

The Polish and Hungarian crises, following on Khrushchev’s violent denunciation of Stalin and advocacy of reform, undermined the ...

also as one who wished to be acknowledged as leader without the danger of Stalin’s cult of the personality re-emerging. Despite ...

to organise an increasingly sophisticated economy without relegating the party to a subordinate role in the state, a subordinati ...

except to accelerate the arms race. Khrushchev’s most daring attempt to redress America’s geo- graphical advantage in its confro ...

Khrushchev’s dynamism and experimentation alarmed the party bureaucracy. His lack of success, especially in agriculture, did not ...

Dwight D. Eisenhower was a military hero before he became president. Immensely popular, with an infectious boyish grin, he repre ...

tration to defend the US within and without from the communist enemy, Eisenhower appeared out of touch, unable to check the exce ...